"I’ve always loved Del. He was my first hero when I was young. When 'Runaway’ came out I was only 13 or 14. I had to have my own rock star. Well, they weren’t called ‘rock stars’ then – they were all pop stars. But my sisters had had Elvis – and I loved Elvis of course – but you had to have your own hero, you know? So Del Shannon was my one. But there’s a great story about Del and ‘Runaway’. He’d made the record and he was on the road and someone had sent him a copy of the record and he put it on his record player, played it and went, ""what the fuck?!"" It was semitone faster than it should have been! And he phones up his manager and he says, ""what the hell have you done to my record?"" And the manager said, ""oh, we sped it up because we thought it was too slow."" And that’s how it is to this day. It’s in B flat minor instead of A minor. Which is amazing and it sounds better when it’s sped up. I’ve slowed it back down to see what it sounded like when it was originally done and it doesn’t sound as good as the sped-up version. You can tell that his vibrato is really fast and you can tell it’s sped up."

"That's a record that Jack [Bevan] from Foals had discovered when we were living in Oxford writing Total Life Forever and there were eight of us in one house: other musicians, no TV, just a record player in the fireplace. The house was falling apart and that record was the soundtrack to that whole period, 2009 to 2011. It was the record I felt envious of not having made. They did something that I felt I was close to being able to make but also superior, and it wasn't what I'd made! I thought: ""Shit, they got there first!"" It's a strange record from a strange group because they seem underappreciated and under-exposed and never really play live. We ended up going to record in Gothenburg and we met Dan Lissvik on this industrial estate in the winter. He talked about how life is a pendulum and he sits above it; he was chain smoking and was a good guy. The record itself though is somebody's idea of West Coast hip-hop filtered through a suburban Swedish kid's imagination. It is at odds with what Gothenburg is like in the winter. The production on it is amazing, with elements of interlocking guitars, but it's freer and maybe it helped us loosen some of the strictness that was in the band at the beginning sonically."

"Me and James were obsessed with the NME ‘100 Best Albums Of All Time’ in the mid 80s, so we started buying as many as we could - Marquee Moon, Blonde On Blonde, The Clash... some of them we had anyway, but then there were things like Pet Sounds, which was really high, and when you’re 14 you think of the Beach Boys as fucking idiots going “doo wop”, don’t you? We both got What’s Going On and I think it’s the first time I realised, in an exotic way, that politics could translate. Through colour, through country - you could still feel the desperation of someone else even though it was your first exposure to music like that. Obviously my Mum and Dad had tons of records, but the intimacy of playing that in your bedroom and being transported to another world of the same anger you were feeling, but then in such a graceful way. ‘Inner City Blues’, the title track, ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’. There’s lot’s of brackets - lot’s of songs with brackets. I love that idea of brackets. I love the cover. You can still put it on today, and obviously in the studio we have lots of vinyl and a record player - you put that one in particular and it drifts, it seduces you but it also stimulates."

"I think it's a bit different compared to Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk and the others. It's Ihsahn's [guitarist and vocalist] expertise at this kind of music that I love. This album is quite progressive compared to some of the earlier stuff. I've not made it a secret that I love that sound and that type of music. Ihsahn is just a great guitar player, and as singer he was always doing things a little bit different to other bands in that genre. It's a real showcase of his ability to write and perform this type of sound. I'm a fan of everything he's done, especially that first solo album [The Adversary from 2006], but I'm a much bigger fan of Emperor. I found out about Emperor by doing what I think a lot more people should do, which is take the time to look around and search for new and exciting bands. That's how I've always found music from day one, just by asking around. Discovering a band by yourself is great and a very DIY way to do things. Making an extreme metal record with him is still on the bucket list. I just wish I had more time. We're still in contact and I talk to him once or twice a year and hopefully I'll see him when we go over to do these shows in Sweden."

"They're an incredible band, on Fiction and maybe even slightly discovered by The Cure. They were Americans but lived in London and were involved in the Camden scene with Silverfish, Ligament and all these kind of bands. It's almost metal, but it's also really bleak. A wonderful band, they made two records and then the bass player died so I never got to see them live. Martin our drummer saw them play. When we started Mogwai they were one of the bands we all bonded over. We were all big God Machine fans and actually used to do a couple of covers of their songs. The records have definitely held up and stood the test of time. I think I found them, you're about the same age as me so you'll remember this, but whenever a major label like Fiction tried to punt a new band they're pretty much give the records away, so you'd get singles and 7" for 49p. You could try out a lot of bands. When I moved my records a few years ago I had so many 7" of horrible bands that are just cataclysmically awful that I bought just because they were 50p. But that's how I discovered The God Machines and they're a big Mogwai band, there's no argument about that."

"Similar time to The Human League obviously - it's just another synth-pop classic. It's when O.M.D. still had a much more experimental edge and yet similarly to the League, they had some stonking tunes, the two 'Joan Of Arc' ones, and 'Souvenir's on that as well, which I absolutely adore. I remember I bought the single of 'Souvenir' and probably the single record that I have played most in my life. I just kept it on repeat on our old record player in the house. That would have been in Enniskillen Woolworth's, probably along with Roland Rat or something - everybody buys shit records at the time as well and accidentally buys good ones when you're that young. I hold all of the above in mind when writing music and yet you're also trying to expunge them from your mind as well! It's a very complicated process - you can't help being the sum of your parts and you can't help little bits of the things you love coming out. If a certain chord does a certain thing in one of those songs that makes you kind of tingle, then you're looking for the tingle, but you're not looking to do it with the same chord, if you know what I mean! So you might use the same kind of mechanics but not the same notes."